Temporal Remorse

I’m sensitive to a very particular type of regret, one that I don’t hear people talk about often. I was discussing this with my roommate after he finally checked out our roof deck, a month into living here. He was mad at himself for not going up sooner, especially with so few good-weather days left in the year. We came up with the term “temporal remorse” together; it’s the impulse, after having just enjoyed something, to express contempt for the earlier versions of yourself who were too stubborn to give it a chance.

Say you have a fear of really tall rollercoasters, and your whole life you’ve avoided going on the twisty rides at Six Flags. One day, while at a theme park, a few of your friends convince you to join them just once. Terrified, you begrudgingly accept the challenge and sit as far away from the front of the coaster as you can manage. The operator starts the ride, and suddenly the fear and panic that you were expecting becomes an adrenaline-filled rush. You can’t help but smile through the discomfort as colors blend together, your stomach drops, and the people below increase and decrease rapidly in size. Once the ride is over, you join your friends to debrief, and ask them if they’d like to go again. What once scared you is now something that you take joy in, and you wonder why you didn’t try this sooner.

We all have stories that are similar to this. The above example is actually a personal anecdote from when I was in 10th grade or so. To paint another picture, I didn’t start listening to Magdalena Bay until March of this year after I fell in love with Imaginal Disk (2024). My first thought after hearing these songs for the first time was roughly as follows: what do you mean I could have enjoyed this music two additional years prior? And you mean to tell me that I was at Lollapalooza in 2025, where they performed the entire album top to bottom, and didn’t give their name on the lineup a second look? Oh, the missed opportunity!

This particular flavor of remorse comes with a small acknowledgement that our time on Earth is finite. If we had forever, missing a couple of years of an artist’s tours wouldn’t matter; there would always be another chance to catch up. My roommate wasn’t that upset about the roof deck in the abstract. It’s nice, but he was far more frustrated by the month of good weather he’d spent inside. I reckon that people who think most about their own mortality (guilty) are also the most susceptible to this feeling.

The existence of temporal remorse implies the existence of temporal gratitude, which is much less commonly felt but an interesting concept nonetheless. To feel grateful for the present is something that we can meditate on and has tangible things we can point to. To feel grateful for one’s friends, or their health, or their occupation, we can nod in agreement that it is natural to feel thankful for these when asked to give thanks. What’s even more promising is the idea of saying “I am grateful that I’ve spent the last 2 years in the gym.” Looking back, you’re grateful that an earlier version of yourself was willing to take a chance or remain steadfast in working toward a goal.

It follows that if we can feel this type of gratitude, then we can examine how we can best act now in order to decrease the future probability of temporal remorse. Put plainly, what can you start doing today that your future self will thank you for?

There are some obvious answers that come to mind, like going to the gym or starting to learn a new skill/hobby/craft. Nobody who has been playing piano for a decade only wishes they’d been playing for 5 years. These are things that require present investment for future reward; type 2 fun. But there’s a whole other category of experiences which fall under “things we don’t yet know we’ll enjoy.” You have a sense that going to the gym will make you feel better. But I had no such intuition in listening to Magdalena Bay, or being whipped around by a roller coaster.

How are we supposed to make decisions today on behalf of a future self whose preferences we don’t even know?

One could argue that this means we simply need to keep trying new things. I’m all for it. Going to random concerts or taking classes in things you’re unfamiliar with will almost certainly make you learn a lot more about yourself. This philosophy is appealing, particularly because the cost of being wrong is usually quite small. If you don’t like a new band at a concert, you’ve lost an evening. And if you do, you might have discovered something that you’ll enjoy for the rest of your life.

It’s impossible, however, to try and spend time manufacturing gratitude for our future selves. We run the risk of neglecting the people that we are today. Someone who spends all their time in the gym might one day wish they’d given more of it to their close friends. Temporal remorse also takes for granted that an earlier version of you would have enjoyed it the same way, which isn’t guaranteed. I like to imagine that I would have loved Imaginal Disk just as much in 2024 as I do today, which is impossible to know for certain. Art of any kind speaks to our current perception of the world. In high school, I was listening to EDM and future bass at full volume; that version of me wouldn’t have been able to understand or appreciate psychedelic rock at all.

Temporal remorse feels a little unfair. We judge our past selves with information that they couldn’t possibly have had, and then ask our present selves to make decisions in anticipation of a future that we can’t possibly know. How is that productive?

I suppose the best we can do is give those future versions of ourselves a few more opportunities to be grateful. We can invest in the things we already know are good for us, and remain curious about the things we don’t yet fully understand. Not every experience needs to be enjoyed, and not every decision needs to “pay off”. However, there’s something comforting about knowing that, somewhere down the line, a future version of yourself might look back on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday and be very glad that you decided to do something unusual.